Humanity has Declined Review — C

Our lead character is the UN liaison to fairies in a world where humanity has declined.

As those who’ve read my episodic commentaries will know, I was not a fan of this show. Why? After twelve episodes, I still haven’t been able to satisfactorily answer that. But I’ll try once again.

First of all, the show’s message is all over the place. I don’t know what they’re trying to say half the time. The overarching theme seems to be about how humanity can decline (honestly, this just seems stupid to me), but then we have an entire arc about space probes that felt sad, fighting game parodies, and a random arc about time travel.

Space probes that feel sad? Come on guys. As someone who works on robots this is just insultingly stupid. Are the creators of this show capable of rational thought?

It sure doesn’t seem like it, since they have to invent problems to make fun of where none exist. I mean, it’s not like the earth’s population is growing exponentially or anything: I’m pretty sure humanity is going to die out soon and nobody will care!

Apparently, or so I’m told, the show’s major concern is that people pour all their energy passionately into one thing (such as writing yaoi) which leads them to neglect other important pursuits and will lead to humanity’s extinction.

Well, I learned about this “problem” in my sixth grade history class. It’s called “specialization” and it’s what led humans to move from nomadic tribes to cities and form civilizations. Yikes. I’d better stop doing things passionately right away!

This has been a life changing anime for me. I hope you can learn a valuable lesson from Humanity has Declined too and remove all the cancerous passion from your lives.

Oh, yeah, the main character’s sarcastic comments are amusing though. Full letter grade up for that.

You completely missed the point about the space probes arc. What it meant that was humans take interest in meaningless things instead of important issues. Instead of trying to improve the situation on the Earth, the people were more interested in space exploration even though there was absolutely no benefit to it in the context of the show. The space probes (nonhumans) thought themselves as humans when their memories were damaged, and associated the Earth with home and warmth (with their memories damaged/and with their memories intact), while the humans were working on the human monument project, celebrating past society instead of trying to improve their lives, and being more interested in space travel, which is irrelevant to the Earth’s current situation.

Space exploration is meaningless and irrelevant? Screw that. My point about this show having a terrible message is even more true than I realized. The creators lack any ambition whatsoever and think the world is going to fall apart because the rest of the world shares their apathy.

Space exploration is meaningless in the world of this show. They don’t have the resources to even build a ship if they could find another habitable planet. It’s a completely and utterly useless waste of time in this post-apocalyptic society. Seriously, this is something very easy to understand, and probably one of the easiest topics in the series to understand. But of course, you would like to twist all and any meaning to be as terrible as you would fancy it to be

It was Voyager and Pioneer, they built them before humanity had declined. So I’m not sure how the resources available at the time of the show, after humanity’s decline, has anything to do with whether space exploration was a worthwhile endeavor at the time of their creation. I was talking about whether space exploration is worthwhile in the present.

I think it’s really much simpler than all that. Japan’s population is declining through a combination of demographics and restrictive immigration policies. I think this is hinted at in the opening: we see a huge city (Tokyo, perhaps) which is replaced by a rural landscape, with much the same topography, suggesting that the city just isn’t there anymore.

This feature of demographics (touched on in Manabi Straight as well) puts the author and the Japanese audience into a particular frame of mind, and the show you see is the result.

I also wonder to what extent the “fairies” are actually just foreigners, consistently getting Japanese culture wrong in subtle ways.

That seems to be the most reasonable way to view the show. Still, I don’t think the Japanese need to worry much… I mean, the rest of the world’s population isn’t declining. Plus, their population density is amazingly high already, I don’t think they need to worry that much.

If the fairies are meant to represent foreigners, then I can only marvel at the extent of the writer’s xenophobia… Which, now that I think about it, would certainly help to explain his fear of a declining population…

I recently rewatched Jintai in historic order and it grew even more on me than before. There is some storytelling if you watch it in this order, e.g. Watashi’s personal growth and her making friends w/ humans and fairies alike. Admittedly I didn’t find a consistent message, either, but I didn’t care that much. The time travel arc was the weakest one for me (except for awesome Ringo Kid), as well. I liked the space probes, though, but I’m a hopeless romantic.

I think I basically watched it for Watashi, for the fluffy visuals and for the laughs and I wasn’t disappointed. The bread in the first aired episode already deserves a full letter upgrade in any case and Watashi deserves two if you ask me!

If it makes more sense in historical order, why did they air it in a jumbled order? The ordering still makes no sense for me except that it’s fashionable nowadays. I have to agree that the time travel one was the worst, I found the space probes silly but the time travel was just insultingly pointless.